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@Sidewalker
Oh pulease, you really think that since your felon,
Only in the minds of 12 gullible jurors fed on years of MSNBC propaganda. No reasonable person took the "verdict" seriously. At best it is technically true that he's a felon (and IIRC Trump has appealed) but the fact carries zero moral weight.
rapist
Also nope.
pathological liar candidate
Most of the time he just exaggerates. And I recall hearing plenty of mistruths from Harris during the debate (and no, before you ask, I'm not interested in re-watching the debate to refresh my memory as to what they specifically were; I spotted them as I was originally watching it, and they were rather numerous).
that it makes you better people
We're doing just fine and have no need to be "better people", save from a general religious perspective applicable to all of humankind.
You MAGA fucks
There it is. The "party of love" that ran a "campaign of joy" takes the mask off for the kajillionth time to show the American public just how hateful, spiteful, bigoted, nasty, close-minded, ignorant, petty, and vulgar they truly are.
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Good. Hopefully now the party will drop the pretense that the candidates they field are morally better people than Trump.
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This is a thought experiment about a legislative model that I thought up some time ago. Admittedly I have some deja vu while posting, but it appears I've never created a thread about this topic so whatever.
The foundation of the Comitia is a society where the average voter asks his or her self this question:
"Who do I want representing me in Congress today?"
I italicized the "today", because that really is the crux of it. There is no election day, because it's always election day for someone. There are no districts, just delegates with X or Y number of votes backing them.
Basically, anyone would have a right to sit in the Comitia and vote if, at the start of that business day, 50 backers had their votes delegated to him/her. Some delegates might have 50 backers, while others might have 50,000 or even 50,000,000. There would be no elections with winners and losers, only whales and small fries, constantly bargaining with each other in a bid to form coalitions and swing votes. The number of backers would determine voting power; for example, if a group of delegates backed by a cumulative total of 35,000,000 people voted Yea to Resolution 555, while a group of delegates backed by a cumulative total of 34,999,999 people voted Nay, then the motion would pass, assuming a simple majority sufficed to pass it.
Anyone could re-delegate their vote at any time by visiting either the post office or a permanent voting precinct (or even a mobile app), and voting power in the Comitia would be re-apportioned at the start of the next day to reflect these changes.
The advantages are straightforward. In real life, if a Senator was elected on a moderate conservative Christian platform to a 6-year term and then was videotaped engaging in kinky master-slave roleplay with his black boyfriend, on day 1 of office, then the voters who put him there would have to wait 6 years to remove him. But under a Comitia system, his backers could immediately wash their hands of him and give their votes to somebody else. He wouldn't be removed from the Comitia outright, assuming he had 50 backers who either still supported him or were too lazy to change their vote, but he'd be stripped of his political relevancy and his ex-backers could say they weren't still represented by a guy whose values were at odds with their own.
Put more simply, delegates would have to be very responsive to the wants of their constituents and avoid scandals, because their voting power could tank very quickly if they misstepped. Players and factions could rise and fall, wax and wane, in the span of a week. Having a large number of ordinary citizens with experience as delegates, such as getting together with your relatives and appointing your uncle to the Comitia, could raise popular participation in government at the highest levels of power, and lessen people's sense of alienation and disenfranchisement.
Obviously, this body would need complicated rules regarding committee assignments and allocation of budget for staffers. How that would work is outside the scope of this post, but I'm sure somebody could get it to work.
Anyways, what are your thoughts?
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@RemyBrown
You love Trump because of policy group A (which can encompass multiple policies or maybe just 1). If Harris enacted everything in group A, then you would still hate her.
You mean if she legit became a Republican? No, I wouldn't hate her then. It'd be an exaggeration to say I "hate" her now. Even as the Democratic nominee she was not the kind of person who elicited that sort of visceral emotion.
You hate Harris because of policy group B (which can encompass multiple policies or maybe just 1). If Trump enacted everything in group B, then you would still love Trump.
If Trump became a Democrat? No, I'd have no reason to support him then. The only two issues where he's a (pre-2016, at least) Democrat are trade and foreign policy, and that's enough to make me shudder. If he was a Democrat on every single issue, you bet I wouldn't vote for him.
Was there supposed to be some point to this thread?
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I should also mention sex. It probably made little difference to the average White male voter whether VP Harris was a man or a woman, as she didn't run a misandrist campaign that would've turned them off, but minority groups often have a machismo culture, and men from these groups might've been seriously reluctant to vote for a woman whatever her politics. But since minority groups are like half of the Democratic base, Harris couldn't afford to lose them. Trump won an astonishing 64% of the Native American vote, and a greater share of the Latino vote than he did in 2020, nearing 50%. My guess is, Native American and Latino men are disproportionately responsible for this outcome.
This is, obviously, not the only reason, since Hillary did fine with minorities in 2016. Perhaps her mix of high-level experience as former Secretary of State, and association with and "proper" feminine-coded loyalty to a powerful man (Bill Clinton), helped her overcome these hurdles.
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@WyIted
I don't have time for detailed reasoning but from studying historical trends and seeing g the chess pieces moving.
I don't.
You mentioned the rise of Christianity but we don't have good data on how it spread, given how long ago this happened, how little surviving literary output the Roman Empire produced to say nothing of detailed census records, the fact that it was a relatively underground movement at the time, and that its jump from 5-10% of the population to the majority religion happened after Constantine legalized and favored it.
The vast bulk of Church Father writings are from the 3rd century or later, and surviving tracts against the Christians are far less numerous than those favorable accounts the Christians wrote about themselves. We have a vague sense of what the Romans accused them of - impropriety to the old gods, disloyalty to the Emperor, being Jews (I.e. part of the religion that perpetrated the genocidal Kitos War against their gentile neighbors), sexual immorality and cannibalism in their secretive religious rites, being ignorant and low class, etc. But these may be post-hoc justifications for disliking a group they already disliked; for instance, it's obvious to us now that early Communion was a harmless rite, the writings of Paul were quite sophisticated at times, the Christians had no affiliation with Jewish nationalist movements (who hated and persecuted them), and there were affluent Christians, evidenced by the existence of literate Church Fathers.
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That and inflation. Every Dem I've come across has obstinately downplayed how awful inflation has been for vast swaths of the voting public who haven't gotten major payraises in the last 4 years. They should've acknowledged the problem and focused their energies on blaming Trump/Republicans for it, instead of trying to gaslight tens of millions of Americans that their struggles aren't real. Instead, they effectively conceded the issue to their opponents, and that was one issue they couldn't afford to do this on.
Abortion bans are, unfortunately, unpopular, and so was Dobbs v. Jackson, but in practice the outrage stemming from this issue was only enough to win Democrats one election (the 2022 midterms). Republicans were never going to get enough House or Senate seats to pass a Federal abortion ban given the filibuster, and "only" 3 out of the 7 swing states in this election had abortion bans in effect of any kind. Of these, only one (Georgia) has a serious 6-week ban, with North Carolina's 12 weeks and Arizona's 15 weeks making abortion effectively still accessible for any woman who knows early on she doesn't want to be a mother. So the issue didn't personally affect enough women living in the right states to make a difference this time around.
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@WyIted
The transition of "MAGA" from a lazy campaign slogan recycled from the Reagan era to a descriptor for an entire wing of the Republican Party is fascinating, because it doesn't seem to clearly stand for anything that other Republicans don't, making it unclear how it could survive losing the one common denominator uniting them under the label (Trump).
My explanation would be that politics in America are a game of musical chairs. Parties will switch positions; for example, RFK would've been rather unambiguously a Democrat in the mid to late 20th century but now his views are more fashionable among Republicans. Or the GOP being anti-tariffs and pro-free trade before Trump, with Democrats like Sanders embodying the opposite vision, but now they've switched places. This naturally arises from the constant struggle to poach one demographic or another from the enemy camp, which produces tensions within the party that the other side can then exploit. One side gets a short-term advantage but a sort of equilibrium eventually takes hold, and at the end of this cycle neither party is quite the same as it was when it started. The Trump-era GOP is merely the latest iteration of partisan evolution in America.
As for why Trump specifically won in 2024, it'd be a mistake to think this is some historic moment that means the death knell for Democrats. Dems were gloating about Republican underperformance in the 2022 midterms and not so subtly making this same assumption about future Republican prospects, only for the tables to turn 2 years later. I'll say that in 2022, the typical middle class moderate who wants stability and instinctively dislikes extremism was most worried about Trump's behavior in the aftermath of 2020 and voted accordingly. Two years later, the over-the-top hysterical fearmongering from the media about Trump getting re-elected, and the unironic demand that all Republicans render their political goals and hopes of representation in the Federal Government subservient to the single-minded goal of defeating Trump and putting a hardcore progressive in the White House for 4 years or else they're voting for Hitler, struck them as more worrying and extreme than Trump himself, and the post-election meltdowns that I've read over the last 2 days were unlikely to make them regret their vote.
VP Harris faced a paradox: she couldn't simultaneously frame herself as a moderate (re: court that moderate vote) and participate in the fearmongering. But she didn't understand this, so she both tried to come across as a unifying figure with an amorphous, poorly articulated platform and blatantly called Trump a fascist just a few days before the election. In hindsight she should've picked one or the other.
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So I voted today, making this the second time in 8 years that I cast my ballot for Trump.
I'm feeling pessimistic about this whole election, so I predict Harris will win, albeit by a much slimmer margin than Biden's win in 2020. RealClearPolitics currently gives Harris a narrow lead nationwide and Trump a narrow lead in "top battleground" states. While they probably have a conservative bent and overestimate Trump's chances, it's worth noting that they favored Biden by a lot going into 2020. I think 2020 was a one-off event, borne from popular dissatisfaction with Trump's handling of Covid, and won't repeat itself anytime soon, given Biden's also not a popular President and Harris would be the de facto continuation of his administration. Trump on his part is still hated by half of the country, so Biden's unpopularity cannot have the effect of handing this race to Trump. Maybe it could for a different Republican guy. At best, he has a roughly 50% chance; if he does win, it'll be an electoral college win like in 2016.
Chances are good that, after winning, he'll be sentenced to imprisonment in New York. So long as, by that point, it was set in stone that some Republican would take the White House, I wouldn't be upset by this. We needed Trump as a symbol of defiance against left-wing taboos, in order to keep the Overton Window from shifting in a way that would basically kill free speech and a free society, but he's otherwise the most terrible president a Republican could be. President Vance could return this country to normalcy, understood in terms of both pre-2016 and pre-2012 (around the time that, concurrent with the Black Lives Matter protests, the left kicked its puritanical identity politics into overdrive). Trump was meant to be a tool in our toolbelt, not the next generation of Republican leaders.
But if Trump both loses and is sentenced to imprisonment, we'll probably cross a point of no return. Republicans will feel both politically disenfranchised and as if they're being aggressively targeted by an establishment which controls the courts (and of course, more judicial appointments would be made by President Harris, exacerbating that control even further). This will radicalize many people, perhaps to the point of violence. If Democrats want to avoid this, then they ought to be gracious winners and leave Trump alone. He will not be a political threat to them after losing this election.
If Trump does win and take office, I'm feeling mostly optimistic about domestic policy but pessimistic about foreign policy, since he's not a true Republican in the foreign arena. Our party, after all, stands for maintaining a strong military to keep the peace and intervene abroad for good where needed. Trump doesn't give a crap about the rest of the world, and this does not reflect our party's values; coincidentally, fear of his bungling foreign policy is what led me to vote for Hillary in 2016. But when everything is taken into consideration, this risk is one I'm willing to take.
Trump will likely perform better with black men than any Republican in the last 30+ years, and this showing will help dismantle the longstanding taboo within the black community around siding with the GOP on Election Day. His performance among Hispanics will also be surprisingly not terrible. This will also be a more gender-polarized election, with a sharper divide between how men and women vote.
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We're legit going to find out who won in 3 days. I don't know if I'm ready for this. Friiick...
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@n8nrgim
I agree that some minority of Trump voters has a cultist mindset surrounding the man. But for most, it's really quite simple: it matters tremendously what set of policies the Federal Government advances, and the private moral failings of the man assigned to do the job are comparably trivial. It'd be nice if he was a perfect angel, but if principled refusal to vote for him means collective disenfrachisement and letting bad ideologies prevail at the highest levels of government then it's the height of idiocy not to vote for him.
Democrats understand this when it comes to their own side, and I'm not going to let them pretend that they don't. On March 22, 1998, following the Lewinsky Scandal, where it came to light that President Clinton had an extramarital affair and treated women (not least of which his wife) in a distinctly unprogressive way, feminist icon Gloria Steinem wrote an essay defending the man. I'll quote it:
"If all the sexual allegations now swirling around the White House turn out to be true, President Clinton may be a candidate for sex addiction therapy (note: here Steinem downplays his moral failings for partisan reasons). But feminists will still have been right to resist pressure by the right wing and the news media to call for his resignation or impeachment.
For one thing, if the president had behaved with comparable insensitivity toward environmentalists, and at the same time remained their most crucial champion and bulwark against an anti-environmental Congress, would they be expected to desert him? I don't think so." Here Steinem spells out the obvious: that Clinton being personally hypocritical meant little in the grand scheme of things if he used his position to advance policies that his voter base wanted.
Now, following this Steinem makes the claim that the affair with Lewinsky was more consensual than the purported (still to this day unproven) relationship between Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill. More recently, around the time of the #metoo movement's height, Lewinsky suggested that it was less so than the general public believed. And there were other allegations against the man of unwanted harassment which'd already come to light by 1998. But regardless, the subject of Steinem's letter, the Lewinsky affair, even with the knowledge generally available in 1998, was not one that could reasonably be construed as something other than a moral failure from a feminist perspective, as he'd violated the trust of his wife.
Again, this was from the pen of Gloria Steinem, the living embodiment of mid to late 20th century feminism. It was practically an endorsement of the man by the collective feminist movement.
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Donald Trump.
Even if every report about him being a dictator-wannaba were true (and there was always a conflict interest by those making these claims, in that their first reason for acting was to damage Trump and the Republican Party, with reporting the facts being second place at best), he's not powerful enough to act on it and he'll certainly be too old to continue a political career by 2029. Hence, the risks, if we were to assume for the sake of argument that there is an actual risk at all, are low.
What we get in return is a President who does Republican stuff. But beyond that, this is a pivotal moment in American history. Christianity is no longer the dominant religion, and some people have sought to replace its former place in society with a new strain of secular fundamentalism.
I don't like the term "woke" because it's overly reductive and vague, but as an umbrella term it works well enough for lack of a better alternative. There are new categories of wrongthink, of "isms" and "phobias" founded upon biased and prejudiced left-wing notions of who is and who isn't allowed to have an ingroup/outgroup bias, and the newly prescribed penalty for these acts is forceful exclusion from institutions, social hubs, and career opportunities that Americans of all stripes are by birthright entitled to access; this differs from mere individuals choosing voluntarily to not associate with someone.
This is, obviously, unacceptable. Whatever the new post-Christian set of American values is, conservatives and Republicans deserve equal say and input as liberals and Democrats in deciding what these look like.
The first step toward making everyone accept this new moral "consensus" is to make it correspond to political reality. Make it so that someone with the social attitudes of Donald Trump is excluded from holding public office. If, on the other hand, he can and he does, then it won't be a settled question in the American consciousness whether his attitudes are unacceptable.
In short, you can't have much of a theocracy when the king is an open sinner and opposes the clergy and their inquisitors down the rung of power.
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@RemyBrown
ShortFatOtaku (a centrist to center-right Canadian YouTuber) did a deep dive video on this topic. The thing about dogs and cats was fake, but what's true is that Haitian refugees were hunting and killing ducks from the local park. A practice which would make sense in Haiti, where food is scarce and people don't care about the eyesore that is butchering an animal in public, but in America posed a nuisance to the local community that wanted to enjoy the park and its wildlife.
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@Double_R
You started off by arguing that Trump is a safe bet because he's been president for four years and none of the crazy things he said he was going to do materialized, but then you acknowledge that he had people all throughout the government working to ensure he didn't do the things he wanted. How do you not see the contradiction in that?
There is no contradiction here. You're assuming that Trump issued secret policy initiatives that avoided leaving a publicly accessible record trail, and that these were just as quietly thwarted by thankless bureaucrats. But the more wacky things that Trump did, in fact, try to do (e.g. the "Muslim ban") he did out in the open by executive order. He was proud of what he was doing and wanted his Republican base to know that he'd done it.
Furthermore, we know that a lot of the insubordination that happened under his administration was people going to the press with things Trump allegedly said in confidence, like the "shithole countries" remark about Haiti. This wasn't a case of Trump saying "I want the US to annex Haiti, but we'll do it secretly and gradually over the course of two years mwahahaha" and then someone blowing the whistle to frustrate these plans and save Haiti. There really was no purpose to telling people Trump said that other than to humiliate him. If your boss tells you to do something illegal, then there's a fair case to be made that you should disobey him and do what you can to keep other employees from complying in your stead. But it's not your job to try to oust your boss from his position because you personally dislike him or believe him unfit for the job. Nor was it theirs. It's pretty clear their motives were partisan.
Anyone who's paid attention to politics over the past decade can easily see this is way, way different. Trump is not the same person he was 8 years ago. 2016 Trump had no idea what he was doing so he surrounded himself with people that (mostly) did. That Trump thought he could ride into Washington a star and ride out a hero in front of parades of adoring fans that would lobby to put his face on Mt Rushmore. 2024 Trump is nothing like this.2024 Trump is angry, bitter, and out for revenge.
Speculation. I remember how, back in 2016, he debated Hillary and openly threatened to put her in jail for the e-mail whatever. The second he won, he forgot all about that. It was almost as if he didn't really care, and rather he played into a narrative of his opponents being corrupt to boost his chances at the polls.
And I'll say this: as a Trump supporter, I too am angry, bitter, and out for revenge. But the name of that revenge is, quite simply, getting Trump re-elected. That act in itself is enough. Trump doesn't have to do anything. He can be a normal, boring Republican president. Just the fact that he's back in the White House and there's nothing they can do to stop him from being there would satisfy me. And to the extent that Trump genuinely is angry, that may also be true for him. As the old saying goes, "A life well lived is the best revenge". Or in this case, a successful career in the face of haters who would try to disqualify you from having it.
2024 Trump understands what went wrong and knows how to ensure that doesn't happen again. 2016 Trump felt the pressure to respect political norms, like appointing people who were qualified. 2024 Trump will appoint only people who are sycophants, in fact that will be the only qualification he cares about.
So Trump simultaneously was a dictator wannabe and "felt the pressure to respect political norms" in his first term?
2024 Trump will not turn to outside lawyers to commit his crimes, this Trump knows now thanks to the supreme court that any conversations he has with his own agencies like the DOJ or the military are "not subject to judicial review" regardless of how brazenly he tells them to do something illegal.
I take it you're once again misrepresenting what that one SCOTUS ruling says?
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@Double_R
Do you take the things Trump says seriously?
Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't. Sometimes he uses deliberate hyperbole, sometimes he voices a spur-of-the-moment opinion he hasn't actually committed to, and so on.
If No (the typical MAGA response), then can you please explain how you square your belief that someone whose words are not to be taken seriously can be fit for the most serious job on earth?
This is a radical concept, I know. Surely you're going to accuse me of spreading right-wing misinformation for saying something so audacious. But here goes:
Trump has been President of the United States before, in the real and recent past. He is re-applying for a job position that he previously held for a full term. Yes, this is the truth. It must be shocking, I know.
Trump was POTUS for 4 consecutive years, four years during which the most bonkers and unhinged takes he made on the campaign trail didn't typically correspond to actual White House policy. He didn't withdraw from NATO. In fact, he approved Montenegro's accession in 2017. He didn't start WW3. He didn't nuke any countries, or tear up the constitution and make himself Caesar.
Unlike VP Harris, who has never spent one day as President and who's been reluctant to roll out her policy agenda, the world knows from 4 years of experience what to expect from Trump. More tariffs, finishing the wall and being harder on illegal immigration than Biden was, probably following the lead of the GOP on Ukraine in practice while bitching about it on Twitter or Truth Social from time to time, and so on.
He might reinstate Schedule F, which is understandably controversial unlike the rest of the "Project 2025" scaremongering rhetoric, but I can understand why he'd want this after four years of rogue executive branch bureaucrats working nonstop to sabotage and humiliate him (see the constant slew of White House leaks during his term, for example). The insubordination he faced from his own people was exceptional, so it's not unthinkable that he should be given an exceptional tool with which to resolve the issue. If you don't want the President having this power, then Congress should've acted to set up a body independent of the President's authority that would identify and punish rogue staffers. Their refusal is tantamount to permission ceded.
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Or, you know, it could be a little something called diplomacy. But sure, this makes him a rooshan poopet. Why not.
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This post is for libertarians, ancaps, or objectivists, but anyone is welcome to opine.
So imagine the ideal deregulated, privatized society. The haves aren't forced to subsidize the have-nots. In theory, if one person violates the property rights of another then they should be made to pay restitution (who does said enforcing is another question for another day).
Imagine a society evenly split between haves and have-nots. It's fashionable for the haves to own $500,000 supercars, both expensive and relatively fragile, to the point where a fender bender could cost $30,000 to repair. You are a have-not with a regular car. One day, while driving, you're distracted. You will spent countless hours of your life behind the wheel, so it was bound to happen at some point; you're not drunk or on your phone. Perhaps you're younger and have less experience driving. In any case, you were following this guy a little too close, and you didn't notice in time when he slowed down to turn. And so, you rear-end him. Fate flips a coin, and it turns out the car you hit was a supercar.
In today's world, there are rules protecting you from being taken through the cleaners for an honest accident. But how should it work in this libertarian world? If you're 100% on the hook for a $30K repair bill, then in practice doesn't that amount to someone else's property rights aggressing against yours? If not, then explain.
Is the problem solved by insurance? If so, then would it be expected that the driver of the supercar fully insure his own vehicle against damages? Is this the ethically right policy? What liability should the driver of the other car have? Would the right outcome ensue in a free market?
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@Mharman
I honestly think people underestimate how much of what he says is serious. He posts too much random nonsense that wouldn't reasonably get a rise out of anyone. Like, why go through the effort if to troll?
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@WyIted
Tabula Rasa is Latin for blank slate. It's of course one of the underlying ideologies that make liberalism a terrible philosophy. This doesn't apply to the champagne socialists I cover in the following threads.
I would argue Tabula Rasa has never been tested on a large scale. People are raised in different families, to different parents with different lifestyles and value sets. The fact that people are given, say, the same education (and in practice they often aren't) doesn't counteract this.
While people are naturally different, it's more than fair to say that a lot of statistics we see in real life would disappear under Tabula Rasa put into action. For example, there's a substantive criminality gap between the average black and the average white person. But if black and white babies were swapped at birth, and the average white person raised in a morally bankrupt ghetto, and the average black person raised in a middle class Christian family that enforced basic discipline at home and away from home, then there's no reason to think the average black person would have a higher likelihood of growing up to become a criminal. In fact, we'd expect this cohort of whites to have a higher crime rate than their black counterparts. Assuming they were raised in the same type of home environments, and assuming the average black person wasn't negatively influenced by older blacks (who reached adulthood prior to the start of this hypothetical experiment) prone to lawlessness, we can expect similar outcomes.
Again, though, this has never been tried. So there's no reason to think Tabula Rasa has been tried and failed.
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@Best.Korea
There aren't that many. But the algorithm funnels this fringe minority into a few spaces where they congregate, reinforce their collective worldview, and create the false impression of their extremely unpopular views being popular. You see this with the "Orthobros" who virtually don't exist offline but believe their tiny movement to be the future of American Christianity.
The fact that you think pedophiles are all over YouTube suggests you're drawn to pedophile spaces. If you want out of the rabbit hole, just right-click on the offending videos and select "Not interested". Eventually other kinds of content will be suggested instead.
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From what I've heard, a lot of "nuclear waste" isn't nuclear material at all, but rather miscellaneous items (such as clothing) that become radioactive through exposure to nuclear material.
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@Best.Korea
Totalitarian state develops naturally
No it doesn't. The totalitarian state was foreign to the lived experience of most pre-modern humans.
For instance, the "universal patriotic education" wasn't a thing, because most people weren't educated and those who were received such from a school tied to a religious institute. Unless you were living in the Papal States or whatnot, there was some difference between clerical and secular authority. The king's self-interest was maximum self-aggrandizement, while temples existed to give glory to a god. Whereas one king inevitably grows old, dies, and passes the reins to his successor (or is violently overthrown), the gods were immortal and outlasted any one man, or one dynasty, or a whole civilization even. We can view this as foreshadowing the modern judiciary, which is separate from the executive/legislative branch and whose loyalty is to a higher constitution, which embodies an otherwise abstract higher law. Religions have always been a thing, and so there has always been a challenge to the unchecked power of a worldly monarch. This failed only where he claimed to be a god-king, or at least a priest-king, and if the latter then this implied a degree of subservience to an organization not totally under his control. Where the loyalties of the people are divided between church and state, or in modern terms the state versus the high ideas that the state purports to uphold, a needed prerequisite for totalitarianism will not materialize.
Also in pre-modern times, rule of law was weak and technology allowing for mass surveillance didn't exist. Penalties for breaking the king's law could be harsh, but this had to be weighed against the relative unlikeliness of being caught, depending on the manner of the offense. If you were caught, sometimes you could bribe your way out of trouble, or skip town and restart your life elsewhere, since communication over long distances was crude. Or perhaps the local magistrate, who enjoyed a tremendous deal of discretion in practice, just didn't care about punishing you even if he was technically required to. And of course, sometimes a count or duke would rebel against the king and there'd be a strip of land where the king's word is not law. If the king was determined to put you to death for capricious reasons and relayed this command to all of his subordinates, then you could take a chance that such a duke couldn't care less, provided you were able and willing to travel. Even today, many countries are unstable and the central government doesn't call the shots everywhere; for example, a Syrian who didn't have permission from a foreign government to leave Syria could internally migrate to Rojava or Idlib and so evade the Assad regime. Dare I say that a majority of the world's countries are still vulnerable to civil wars breaking out.
Yes, technology has been a game changer on many fronts, but it also gives us new tools to challenge established authority. In Europe today, a continent with harsh gun control laws, enthusiasts are printing the FGC-9 semi-automatic rifle from the comfort of their homes. These guns are being used in Myanmar to fight the military dictatorship, and successfully so. Technology can be used to pirate TV, movies, or computer programs. When corporate monopolies try to censor speech, those on the receiving end of the stick flock to alt-tech platforms (admittedly inferior to the big mainstream platforms but better than nothing). When the banks freeze an influencer's account because they don't want him getting donations because they hate what he says, he can open a crypto wallet. Chinese citizens have used VPNs for years to circumvent the Great Firewall. And so on.
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This should've been obvious in anterospect.
UBI is free cash with no strings attached. You don't have to spend it on rent or repaying student loan debt or on health insurance. It's just...free cash. It offers a powerful and sudden temptation to indulge. And by the time the money runs out, you just may find that you've picked up some bad habits that leave you financially worse off in the long run than you were when you started.
Add to this general ignorance. Some years ago, I was asked by my sister what I'd do if I had $30,000. I answered that you couldn't get by for life on $30,000 or buy a house with it, so I might as well just blow the money on something that I would enjoy. She pointed out that I could invest that $30,000 and reap huge dividends in just a few years, and I felt like an idiot. I think I've learned my lesson from that conversation, but there are a lot of folks out there whose default assumptions when it comes to money are like mine back then. Putting aside character defects (e.g. poor impulse control), many decent or semi-decent people would simply draw blanks when they asked themselves what to spend their UBI check on. So they'd buy a sports car: an asset that depreciates rather than appreciates over 5-10 years and costs a lot to insure or repair. Or some other crap that doesn't do anything for them, even if it doesn't hurt them per se.
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@FLRW
Would Jesus have supported UBI?
He would tell people to open their wallets and provide for those unable to provide for themselves.
Let's not conflate this with support for a clientelist robber state where inalienable property rights (which is to say, the right to choose for one's self what to do with one's rightful property in this life) are trampled on roughshod by a regime installed by an imported majority.
From Mein Trumpf
Being told "No, you can't have other people's stuff without their consent" is not the same as genocide. Nice try though.
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@WyIted
You know Russia would never attack the United States right? Militarily they would be crushed.
Picture this. Russia invades Ukraine. Nobody helps them, and Ukraine rolls over and gets crushed.
Russia waits a few years. It rebuilds its army, and so does its puppet government in Ukraine. Then they invade Belarus. It rolls over. They wait a few months. Then Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus invade Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. Nobody helps them. Russia waits a few months. Then it, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia invade Moldova and Romania.
Wait a few years. Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Moldova, and Romania invade Poland. Wait a few years. Then they invade everything east of Germany. Wait a few years. Then Russia + the entirety of Eastern Europe invades Germany.
Wait a months. Then Russia, Eastern Europe, and Germany invade everything to the east of France, including Italy and Scandinavia.
They wait a little while to recover, then turn east. Russia + all of Europe to the east of France conquer Turkey. Then Russia + all of Europe to the east of France + Turkey conquers Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Mongolia. By now, the de facto Russia empire looks like this:
Give it another 10, 20 years and soon this will be a globe-spanning empire with a massive force garrisoned on America's doorstep. Would you rather America had to face down an invasion from this empire, or gave Ukraine some money to fight off Russia at stage one of Putin's attempted conquest?
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@WyIted
Say it's the zombie apocalypse, but so far there's just one zombie. Why interfere? Sure, he could bite other people and create more zombies, who themselves would create more, and so on, but you live far away enough that he won't be able to personally reach you. Why not just relax and do nothing?
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@ADreamOfLiberty
Well "illegal" isn't really moral language.
What I originally said is that they're war criminals. This is a legal term, but the average person understands it to have moral connotations as well. It brings to mind Srebrenica or Bucha, or the Einsatzgruppen going from village to village in Eastern Europe shooting unarmed Jews and Gypsies. It's worth saying that the Russians do indiscriminately bomb Ukrainian cities, and Ukrainian civilians do die in these attacks. But morally speaking, anyone who kills a Ukrainian soldier who didn't want to fight and would've rathered live in peace is a murderer.
Given how dogmatic you seem about the rest I have more than a little doubt about the mechanism by which you know (as opposed to have been told) there was no provocation.
Given that Russia started this war, the burden was on them to prove that a provocation happened. And they've yet to do so.
Putin had in 2022, and still has in 2024, access to every classified document put out by the Russian government. He's privy to all the conclusions reached by the Russian intelligence community. He could've declassified and published some piece of incriminating evidence against Ukraine if it existed. Heck, Putin could've doctored evidence if he wanted to, since his control over the Russian state is such that no government insiders would've refuted him. But he didn't even do that much. All he's done is babble nonsense about Nazis (Russia itself has a few neo-Nazi paramilitaries, but like in Ukraine they don't control the government) and nonexistent "biolabs". We're talking Trump-level nonsense from a man who by all accounts is supposed to be a hundred times more professional.
All Iraq needed to do was be mean and apparently fail to track down terrorists in its territory and that counts as "provocation".
Or, you know, be led by a bloodthirsty megalomanic who already tried to annex Kuwait, who used chemical weapons on his own people, who led his country down a disastrous path of international isolation that saw half a million Iraqis starve to death, and who (as confirmed by the US government post-2003) tried to maintain the infrastructure to rebuild his WMD stockpile after sanctions were lifted.
What did Ukraine do? Where are the mass graves of dead Russian speaking women and children in Donbass? How many countries did Zelensky invade?
"this is legal for them to do, look at when they didn't care about the facts". I'm all about the golden rule but the ROC is not the one who designated the proud boys terrorists.
Look, Europe's a sketchy place. We both know that. Rule of law is weak, human rights are hardly respected, and they have zero intention of changing course. They might as well take advantage of the few perks that come with being fascist-lite, such as striking a heavy blow at their enemy in a way that America can't.
You have really been taking a bath in that propaganda. Have they renounced Jesus Christ as the son of god and savior of the world? Or is the issue that they have political commentary you disagree with?
The ROC has spent the last 20 years preaching "Russian world" ideology that justifies foreign aggression like in Ukraine, a war that's killed or wounded a million people. By priming the Russian people and government to think of violence as a good and glorious thing, they're co-responsible with Putin for the fact that this war happened. I don't know about you, but to me this sounds like the polar opposite of a Christian church.
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#6. Criminalization of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) Abroad
Putin should be given a deadline to end the war. After this deadline expires, the EU and Canada should designate the ROC to be a terrorist organization. This is legal for them to do; for example, Canada slapped the Proud Boys with this label a few years ago despite a lack of actual terrorist acts or plots by this group. Europe at large is one step removed from fascism anyway, so they might as well put this to good use. Likewise, an arrest warrant should be issued for Patriarch Kirill.
All properties of the ROC in Europe and Canada should be seized and handed over to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU). Ideally, the OCU would assign priests, bishops, and abbots who are against Russia's war in Ukraine. On Mount Athos, these new abbots should mandate that all monks under their charge sign a written statement condemning Putin's war; those who refuse should be defrocked, excommunicated, and finally deported from Greece if applicable. Where this would leave too few monks left to maintain the properties, the properties should be handed over to, say, the Greek Orthodox Church, erasing Russian presence from the holiest site in Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Which is all too fitting, since the ROC is not a Christian church in any sense of the word.
As for the threat of Russian retaliation, who cares? They're already shutting down Evangelical churches and persecuting believers. There's little point threatening to do something that you're already doing.
Finally, pursuant to the above, the West should grant asylum to top officials of the OCU should Ukraine fall to the Russian invaders, so that it can continue to wield spiritual authority over Russians abroad without having to fear reprisals from the Russian state.
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@ADreamOfLiberty
They took part in an illegal, unprovoked war of aggression. I'm using moral language here, not legal. Legally, I guess, the real estate involved would be like a consulate for Ukraine and the prison guards would have diplomatic immunity as they detained Russian POWs and shot those trying to escape. For this to work, the guards may have to be Ukrainians as opposed to Westerners, which would still accomplish the goal of keeping Russian POWs out of Russia's grasp.
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It is Putin's hope that, with time, the West will get tired of propping up the Ukrainian military and throw in the towel. The best way to deter future Russian aggression is to prove this is not the case, or, if Ukraine does fall, to make sure the Russian people continue to face consequences after the last bullet has been fired. Here are some low-cost measures we could take to render more help to Ukraine than we are currently giving them:
#1. Wartime use of friendly soil
Russian POWs captured by Ukraine should be held in European prisons, and preferably guarded by Western personnel so that the Ukrainian manpower tied up in keeping them from escaping could be reallocated to the front lines. More importantly, it would ensure that Russia doesn't automatically get its POWs back by conquering Ukraine.
On this note Ukrainian should be allowed to set up armament factories in, say, Poland or Romania so that the good work of making defensive weapons can go on unimpeded by Russian bombs. Of course, they shouldn't be allowed to use these weapons before these have been shipped to Ukraine first. Ukrainian drone pilots should also be allowed to work from the safety of Europe or the United States, if this is practical. Finally, Ukrainian weapons that won't be used for a while should be kept under the safety of Polish or Romanian soil until such a time that they're needed again.
#2. Call Russia's Bluff
Ukraine should be allowed to use any weapon in its arsenal against military targets on Russian soil, regardless of where those weapons came from. Russia's been drawing nuclear red lines in the sand for the better part of the last 3 years, and every time that Ukraine crosses them nothing at all happens. Russia's existence virtually by definition cannot be threatened in this war, because Ukraine is weak and because Ukraine would be willing to make peace with Russia at any time, assuming they get their territory and people back.
#3. Contingency Plan
To signal to Putin that even conquering Ukraine won't spell an end to his troubles, the US and its First World allies should sign a treaty codifying into law this pledge: that a Ukrainian government-in-exile, if the country should fall, will be diplomatically recognized for at least 40 years after the fact, and that no sanctions levied against Russia during the war (such as the oil price cap) may be lifted unless the Ukrainian government, be it the current one or a government-in-exile, consents to a peace treaty first. This entity would also receive the necessary funding to sustain basic operations for 40 years, and its employees and leadership will be allowed to stay in a Western country.
Russian POWs, likewise, would never be released without the permission of the Ukrainian government-in-exile in this event, even if this meant their imprisonment for the next 40 years. Since these men are war criminals who invaded a peaceful country, and have probably committed murder in doing so, this outcome wouldn't be unjust. In the US it's not abnormal for a murderer to spend 40 years behind bars.
#4. Olympic Games
Related to #3, the West should pledge to exclude Russia from any Olympic games hosted on their soil, or boycott any Olympic games held elsewhere which does not include the restrictions placed on Russia in 2024, in the event that the war continues without a peace treaty which the Ukrainian government, be it the current one or a government-in-exile, consents to. The 2028 and 2032 summer Olympic games will be held in Los Angeles and Brisbane (Australia), respectively, while the 2026, 2030, and 2034 winter Olympics will also be held in Western countries. The bloc of countries which agreed to the aforementioned treaty should also clench the 2036 summer Olympic games and the 2038 winter Olympic games at the next round of bidding so that there's no chance of Russia participating before 2040 at the earliest, unless Putin agrees to peace with the Ukrainian government.
#5. Denmark
Denmark ought to permanently suspend passage through the Danish Straits for all Russian Navy ships. Furthermore, it should impound and ultimately seize Russian vessels identified as part of the "shadow fleet" which skirts the $60 price cap on oil (much of this activity begins in the Baltic Sea and passes through the Danish Straits). This is probably legal where proven through stuff like satellite imagery that said vessel has sold oil either directly or indirectly to countries party to the cap, including all EU member states. Since much of this fleet is uninsured, losing just one or two vessels could be a huge blow to the fleet's profitability.
Again, these terms ought to be enforced for so long as the Ukrainian government, be it the current one or a government-in-exile, has not signed a peace treaty with Russia.
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@cristo71
The DoD: *spends $840 billion in defense spending per fiscal year*
Also the DoD: "We're being too fiscally responsible! Unless we cut that out and add even more to the $35 trillion in debt we already have, the military will be unable to do its job and lose the next war! The solution isn't to demand our allies pay more on defense! Any suggestion made by Trump is far-right fascism by default and thus unacceptable, no matter how objectively sensible that suggestion is! Nor is it to expand nuclear sharing with our vulnerable allies, because the UN, that eternally gridlocked institution which habitually sides with autocrats and wouldn't lift its little pinky finger to defend Taiwan or the Baltic states, would get mad if we did that! Nope, there is no solution whatsoever except to pour hundreds of billions more down the drain!"
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@Best.Korea
Get ready for the US economy to contract by a third overnight as mass capital flight sets in. Get ready for all foreign investment in the US to dry up, and for all highly skilled, highly paid workers to leave the country and live and work abroad, leaving behind only average people who don't know how to maintain the public and private sector infrastructure needed to keep an advanced economy afloat.
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Nice ragebait. If it wasn't you I might've taken this post seriously.
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@Moozer325
Honestly, most of what she said is a blur. I just remember spotting lies at the time I was watching it. One was the "bloodbath" quote, which was obviously taken out of context. There were some ridiculously high numbers being floated but I don't remember what they are now.
(Sorry I can't be of help, but I have no intention of rewatching that cluster-eff of a "debate".)
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As someone who will vote for Trump in November, VP Harris was tonight's clear winner. She was more articulate than the average Republican expected (basically a repeat of the first 2020 debate in this respect, when Republicans bought into their own propaganda about Biden already being senile at that point, and ate crow when he did fine), and she convincingly feigned such emotions as moral outrage. She lied as boldly as Trump and at this point I think there's no going back. A new trend has been set; blatant liars will be the winners of all our presidential elections for the foreseeable future.
Trump, on his part, was his usual self for most of it but visibly "glitched" at a few points, such as when asked about his questioning of VP Harris's race. The point about illegal immigrants eating pets was ridiculous and will probably become a meme. He had a chance to clarify why Republicans rejected the recent border deal (5,000 illegal crossings a day before Biden was required to take any action was a dealbreaker), but he got sidetracked and let Dems continue to shape the narrative, undermining his credibility on this issue. He was trailing VP Harris before this, or at best they were roughly tied, so what he desperately needed was a good showing tonight. He failed to deliver, and I can only guess what the consequences of that are going to be.
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The man whose guts you all hated until just now? The man you accused of literally starting a foreign war and murdering hundreds of thousands of Iraqis to gain some murky, undefined profit in the oil business (because conspiracy theories are hip and countercultural until Republicans start doing them)?
Am I supposed to be impressed that all it took was for him to bend the knee and say "orange man bad" for you to love him? Yeah, you're right. I am.
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@Best.Korea
I would love if everyone was driving at 15 mph. It would prevent many accidents, like in Japan.
That's easy to say when you're in a city where everything's a 20 minute walk away. But if you lived in a remote area, life itself would become insufferable.
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Okay, I'll admit that cars would still make this dangerous even if people could be trusted. But suppose you lived in a low-traffic neighborhood with a speed limit of 15 MPH.
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@Greyparrot
Yeah, pretty much. When the citizens of a society are better, that beautifies it and creates a better place to live.
We can't think of crime just in terms of statistics, or of a minority which gets victimized in one way or another. We have to think of the broader opportunity costs.
Imagine a childhood where, at 8 years old, you'd leave your house after school each day and wander the neighborhood meeting and befriending different people. Then, as the sun was going down, you'd turn around and head home. Imagine that, as an adult, you could strike up a conversation with anyone you met without fear that the interaction would go badly. You could randomly invite a stranger to your house for a meal, or come dine at their table, and genuinely have little risk to worry about in doing so. Now imagine being a girl/woman and all of the above still held true.
Wouldn't such a place resemble a utopia? But this is what crime robs of us. And to be frank, it's the bare minimum of what the realized conservative project has to offer. This is mere non-aggression; it doesn't touch on positive virtue and a country full of people who all strive for self-betterment and collaborate daily to get there.
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Black Americans are descended mostly from peoples who inhabited the West Coast of Africa. Some of the peoples of this region were Muslim, while others were pagan. Given the long-term competitive advantage of monotheistic religions, the share of pagans was probably higher the farther back you go in time, such as to the height of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. Since the losers of local conflicts were the ones who wound up as slaves, and since Muslim societies would've presumably been better organized to win these struggles, we can assume the large majority of slaves were from pagan backgrounds, and the handful of Muslims found themselves completely isolated and under pressure to abandon their religion, which they and/or their descendants did with time. The process of Christianizing and Westernizing them, again, was hampered by the disinterest by Whites in treating them as equals. For centuries, they had no experience living in a civic society. They knew only the fear of the lash, the gun, and the noose.
By the early 1960s, to their credit, Black Americans had developed a rich tradition of Black churches and there was a growing Black middle class. Many of them had largely integrated despite unfair White-imposed obstacles to doing so. But during the '60s, at the height of the civil rights movement, there was a collective revolt by disaffected and radicalized Black youths against the culture they were both expected and not allowed to integrate into. This was an understandable reaction given the way they'd been treated, but since they had no alternative to fall back on the Black community fell into dissolution and nihilism.
The fourth avenue by which the civilizing process breaks down is social contagion. If a vocal minority flaunts the rules underpinning civilized society, then it can inspire members of the majority to copy their behavior. A de facto coalition of Blacks (not all, but many), Latinos (not all, but many), and a pre-existing minority of lawless Whites has changed the culture to make it not only acceptable but "cool" to reject the values that made America great. This is encouraged further by progressive ideology, which preaches cultural relativism (the idea that a pagan culture and that of an advanced society are equally valid) and conflates looking down on a backward culture which members of a race happen to currently hold to with looking down on the race itself.
America became great not just because of its amazing Constitution but because it was founded by the most civilized peoples in the world, and because later arrivals did for a long time assent to become like them as the price of entry. At this point, a large chunk of the US population consists of "barbarians". I'd say that even a majority is quasi-barbaric. European conservatives have long abandoned the culture wars and assume that if solid governmental norms can be preserved, then civilization will be able to chug along. The problem with this is that, in a democracy, a corrupted majority will, sooner or later, vote for a corrupted government. They won't see the value in preserving things like property rights when they can just use the state to take what they want and see their desires gratified now. And the more their personal shortcomings translate to financial woes, the more they'll be tempted to wield the authoritarian sword for self-enrichment without true self-betterment.
America has long rested on its laurels, or so to speak. Conditions have kept coasting upward through the momentum our ancestors built up, but eventually the poor character of the 21st century American will have consequences. If you are young, then you will see and feel those consequences personally, assuming you aren't living them now. The only solution is to either restore the founding culture of the United States or to replace it with a new culture which, whatever its ethnic origin if any, happens to be just as virtuous as it once was.
Despite how it may have come across, the point of this post wasn't to point fingers at anyone. At this point, we all have one kind of behavioral issue or another. But hopefully you understand the logic tying together the economic, religious, and even Trumpian wings of the GOP. It's not a set of disparate policy positions that have nothing to do with each other. Not when you really look closely.
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Anyway, let's consider the Industrial Revolution. Where did it begin? In Afro-Eurasia where high civilizations sprung up. Where in Afro-Eurasia? In Christendom, whose religion was morality-centric and understood morality in holistic, comprehensive terms as opposed to just respecting a god, a monarch, or one's parents.
Where in Christendom? In Western Christendom, which was more developed than Eastern Christendom. And where in Western Christendom? In the Protestant bloc, specifically Britain and the Low Countries.
In short, the history of the world from the Iron Age to the Industrial Revolution vindicates the conservative project. But if I were to stop this post here, it wouldn't be enough to make my position clear.
Like I stated, the civilizing process is intergenerational. Each young person must be socialized into the norms that've been built up to date, so that he/she too will adhere to them and value them as worth preserving. But there are different avenues by which this process might break down. First, a country might, of its own accord, choose to shrug them off. This is what's happened in the West with most of the sexual taboos of yore, and this is slowly trickling down even to Third World countries.
Suppose you're just a porn viewer. This isn't enormously harmful to society, but it still has consequences. In one major sphere of life, your ability to delay gratification has stagnated, and this will make you more of a hedonist across the board. You lose motivation to work when you don't have to, to take initiatives that'll pay off down the road but don't immediately, when you could just play now. Sex is, of course, not the only kind of gratification, but it matters.
Second, there's bastardry. One or more generations of kids are raised by a single parent, whose full socialization will often be impaired. It's not the child's fault, of course, but it has consequences nonetheless.
Third, there's those who were "barbarians" to begin with. This is where I'm going to get controversial. But like I said, not all cultures produce equal outcomes. Some do more to civilize men than others. Again, it's not a person's fault that they were brought up into such a culture, but it has consequences.
Western/Central Europeans, and their descendants in the US ("Whites"), are the product of 1,500 years of fairly efficient civilizing. Much of this period was traumatic, such as for our ancestors born into a time where stealing a loaf of bread could result in the death penalty. But the merits of this civilizing project were in full bloom by the early 20th century, when most of the world's population lived under the thumb of European colonial powers. The act of colonizing was not itself virtuous (quite the opposite), but it took a great deal of virtue to make a nation strong enough to subjugate a much larger population across the sea if it wanted to.
The descendants of immigrants (voluntary or involuntary) from other civilizational blocs are not. In the US today, the two largest non-White demographics are Blacks and Latinos.
Latinos are descended namely from two groups: Iberians (Spanish/Portuguese) and indigenous peoples of the Americas. The Iberians are Catholics as opposed to Protestant, and due to circumstances like 700-800 years of Moorish occupation and on/off brutal warring known as the Reconquista, were probably behind the Catholic average at the time when Columbus sailed the ocean blue. Backward social structures exported to Latin America certainly didn't help their integration into the European mainstream. The indigenous peoples, on their part, were only halfway Westernized and Christianized, though it certainly didn't help that the Iberians had little interest in treating them as equals and enslaved many of them for centuries.
I'll add that there were Catholic and Eastern Orthodox immigrants (e.g. Irish, Poles, Italians, Russians, Ukrainians, etc.) from across Europe who came to the United States, who successfully assimilated without having to give up their religion. The reason is because, being vastly outnumbered, and with new arrivals (who might reinforce the old culture) cut off by the 1924 immigration reform bill, they adopted the culture and lifestyle norms of the majority in all respects except for their private religion.
The 1965 immigration reform bill, which dropped the unfair racial quotas that existed under the 1924 immigration regime while keeping limits on the number of people allowed to immigrate per year, was a fair compromise. Anyone from anywhere in the world could come, so long as it was in a controlled trickle that'd force them to become proper Americans. Illegal immigration, however, has fundamentally broken this compromise. Immigrants from Latin America are unvetted and so numerous as to make forcing them to assimilate into the majority culture a challenge.
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This is not a manifesto preceding a violent act. Rather, think of it simply as a higher quality than usual post from me. I wish to explain the logic underpinning modern conservatism, namely from a US-centric perspective but also corresponding to how it tends to manifest around the world. Everything I'm about to write will not be popular. I expect accusations of "bigot", which is modernity's equivalent to "heretic", to be flung around liberally. But for the record, I do not care. I intend to describe the world as an intellectually honest person can see that it is.
First, I ought to begin with the question: what is conservatism?
Some would say it's synonymous with "right-wing". Others say the conservative is doggedly pro-status quo. In that sense, a Soviet hardliner in 1991 who opposed the dissolution of the U.S.S.R. in favor of preserving communism might've been labeled a conservative. Same for a jungle savage who offers his children as sacrifices to the sun god and resists calls by a Christian missionary to stop doing so.
But I'd tender another definition. Conservatism is that which, in pre-modern times, before the advent of progressivism, was the was the core engine of human progress. It was the progressive ideology of its time, which was for many thousands of years. It was independently invented in many times and places, and indeed never stopped being continuously reinvented.
When we imagine progress, we're susceptible to what's called the just world fallacy. The 1950s were, compared to the 2020s, a materially backward time. We are much wealthier today than they were back then, and things like Jim Crow have since been abolished. Thus, the abolition of Jim Crow must also constitute progress.
Now, I don't disagree with this one. Jim Crow was obviously bad. But you could leap to the same conclusion about other things where unwarranted. Society is less religious today than it was 60 years ago, so less religion must be progress. The sexual revolution happened, so that must be progress too. We have a lavish welfare state that we didn't have 70 years ago, so the lavish welfare state must be progress, even when it's driven us $30 trillion into debt. And so on.
The other problem with this thinking is that, for the vast bulk of history, it was the opposite. From the Iron Age to the early stretches of the Industrial Revolution, that which accompanied material progress (e.g. more wealth) was decidedly not irreligion and libertinism. Instead, successful societies grew more pious, more austere in their lifestyles, and so on.
See, man in his natural state is a savage. Man here is a gender neutral term; neolithic adult males had no qualms about killing males from a rival kinship group ("tribe") and taking its women as concubines, while neolithic adult females had no qualms about committing infanticide. The respects in which males and females are savage usually tend to differ, but both are in desperate need of civilizing. It is the role of society to civilize the next generation just as it had the generation before it. Each person must learn to restrain his/her self from doing what he/she ought not to be doing, and each person must learn the discipline to make his/her self do what he/she ought to be doing. This is what enables our race to pull itself from the muck and realize its high potential. It is the difference between the Stone Age and a 21st century paradise. Or, more modestly, the difference between a cyberpunk dystopia and a cyberpunk utopia. Civilized people can build a better future, while uncivilized people can only help tear down what's been built.
First, I ought to begin with the question: what is conservatism?
Some would say it's synonymous with "right-wing". Others say the conservative is doggedly pro-status quo. In that sense, a Soviet hardliner in 1991 who opposed the dissolution of the U.S.S.R. in favor of preserving communism might've been labeled a conservative. Same for a jungle savage who offers his children as sacrifices to the sun god and resists calls by a Christian missionary to stop doing so.
But I'd tender another definition. Conservatism is that which, in pre-modern times, before the advent of progressivism, was the was the core engine of human progress. It was the progressive ideology of its time, which was for many thousands of years. It was independently invented in many times and places, and indeed never stopped being continuously reinvented.
When we imagine progress, we're susceptible to what's called the just world fallacy. The 1950s were, compared to the 2020s, a materially backward time. We are much wealthier today than they were back then, and things like Jim Crow have since been abolished. Thus, the abolition of Jim Crow must also constitute progress.
Now, I don't disagree with this one. Jim Crow was obviously bad. But you could leap to the same conclusion about other things where unwarranted. Society is less religious today than it was 60 years ago, so less religion must be progress. The sexual revolution happened, so that must be progress too. We have a lavish welfare state that we didn't have 70 years ago, so the lavish welfare state must be progress, even when it's driven us $30 trillion into debt. And so on.
The other problem with this thinking is that, for the vast bulk of history, it was the opposite. From the Iron Age to the early stretches of the Industrial Revolution, that which accompanied material progress (e.g. more wealth) was decidedly not irreligion and libertinism. Instead, successful societies grew more pious, more austere in their lifestyles, and so on.
See, man in his natural state is a savage. Man here is a gender neutral term; neolithic adult males had no qualms about killing males from a rival kinship group ("tribe") and taking its women as concubines, while neolithic adult females had no qualms about committing infanticide. The respects in which males and females are savage usually tend to differ, but both are in desperate need of civilizing. It is the role of society to civilize the next generation just as it had the generation before it. Each person must learn to restrain his/her self from doing what he/she ought not to be doing, and each person must learn the discipline to make his/her self do what he/she ought to be doing. This is what enables our race to pull itself from the muck and realize its high potential. It is the difference between the Stone Age and a 21st century paradise. Or, more modestly, the difference between a cyberpunk dystopia and a cyberpunk utopia. Civilized people can build a better future, while uncivilized people can only help tear down what's been built.
There is, of course, not just one human society. People were geographically distributed wherever they could eke out a living.
All of them started out knowing little to nothing, so those which moved out of the Stone Age developed culture and underwent cultural evolution. Some, like China, India, Sumer, and the Mesoamericans (who to be fair weren't just one civilization), gradually built sophisticated cultures without having to borrow much from the outside world. But for most, the process entailed borrowing and at times being borrowed from. To name a minor example, Alexander the Great adopted court etiquette practices from the Persians who he'd conquered. The Carolingians and their successor states at times did the same with the Byzantine court. This is, of course, to say nothing about things like literature. Likewise, cultures rose and fell; for example, the complicated and stratified society that the Zoroastrians had built in Iran was washed away with the Islamic conquests, which imposed its own (in some respects superior) structure but retained a few native Iranian elements.
By the year 1500, there were distinct civilizational blocs in Afro-Eurasia. Western Christianity, Eastern/Oriental Christianity, the Islamic world (Sunni and Shia), India, China and the sinosphere, the Buddhist world, and perhaps Japan. Excluded was northern Eurasia where nobody but nomads lived, much of Sub-Saharan Africa, most Pacific islands, and of course the Americas.
All of these blocs had imposed rules governing everyday life, justified by powerful religious myths (a broad term I use regardless of their objective truth value). There were religious and secular hierarchies. Complicated wasn't better by default, but you couldn't have well-organized without complexity.
Over time, progress was made not just in passing rules but in enforcing them. For example, Catholic clergy were ordered to be celibate early on, but it wasn't until the High Middle Ages that this rule was widely obeyed. There were many centuries during which this rule only existed in the books and not in practice. There was never such a requirement in the Eastern/Oriental Orthodox world. At least in Russia, the title of parish priest was often hereditary; a father would teach his son how to do the job, and then hand the reins to him upon retiring, and this practice continued well into the 19th century. A non-hereditary priesthood had its advantages, such as a more cosmopolitan-minded, well-educated, and meritocratic leadership. (And yes, Protestants eventually did away with celibate priests, but the societies in which Protestantism took hold were already well developed even by European standards so they could afford to do it). Another reason why the Catholic bloc fared better is because the Vatican imposed a uniform liturgical language, thus literary lingua franca, across a vast area, whereas the Eastern/Oriental Orthodox intellectual scene was fragmented among Greek, Church Slavonic, Aramaic, Armenian, Coptic, and Ge'ez speakers. Especially before the invention of the printing press this made a huge difference in developmental outcomes.
To give another example about enforcing rules, polygamy was outlawed by Christianity from the start but it didn't die out in Christian Europe until about the High Middle Ages. Thus, it couldn't be taken for granted that the mere fact of a religion existing led to this kind of progress. It was a continuous battle by the "saints" against the "sinners". Sometimes the moral muscle would atrophy and things would slide backwards, such as in the Ottoman Empire, which became notorious for how common homosexuality and male pederasty was, and in Afghanistan and Pakistan to the point where they're still grappling with bacha bazi today.
Likewise, societies that were already religious could go even further and experience a religious revival. See Geneva under John Calvin's influence, or early modern England where every other crime was punishable by the death penalty. Protestantism led to more puritanical societies than their Catholic neighbors, though Catholicism itself enjoyed a lesser revival through the Counter-Reformation. And this itself was a continuation of growing interest in the religious life that began during the High Middle Ages, such as with the Devotio Moderna movement.
All of them started out knowing little to nothing, so those which moved out of the Stone Age developed culture and underwent cultural evolution. Some, like China, India, Sumer, and the Mesoamericans (who to be fair weren't just one civilization), gradually built sophisticated cultures without having to borrow much from the outside world. But for most, the process entailed borrowing and at times being borrowed from. To name a minor example, Alexander the Great adopted court etiquette practices from the Persians who he'd conquered. The Carolingians and their successor states at times did the same with the Byzantine court. This is, of course, to say nothing about things like literature. Likewise, cultures rose and fell; for example, the complicated and stratified society that the Zoroastrians had built in Iran was washed away with the Islamic conquests, which imposed its own (in some respects superior) structure but retained a few native Iranian elements.
By the year 1500, there were distinct civilizational blocs in Afro-Eurasia. Western Christianity, Eastern/Oriental Christianity, the Islamic world (Sunni and Shia), India, China and the sinosphere, the Buddhist world, and perhaps Japan. Excluded was northern Eurasia where nobody but nomads lived, much of Sub-Saharan Africa, most Pacific islands, and of course the Americas.
All of these blocs had imposed rules governing everyday life, justified by powerful religious myths (a broad term I use regardless of their objective truth value). There were religious and secular hierarchies. Complicated wasn't better by default, but you couldn't have well-organized without complexity.
Over time, progress was made not just in passing rules but in enforcing them. For example, Catholic clergy were ordered to be celibate early on, but it wasn't until the High Middle Ages that this rule was widely obeyed. There were many centuries during which this rule only existed in the books and not in practice. There was never such a requirement in the Eastern/Oriental Orthodox world. At least in Russia, the title of parish priest was often hereditary; a father would teach his son how to do the job, and then hand the reins to him upon retiring, and this practice continued well into the 19th century. A non-hereditary priesthood had its advantages, such as a more cosmopolitan-minded, well-educated, and meritocratic leadership. (And yes, Protestants eventually did away with celibate priests, but the societies in which Protestantism took hold were already well developed even by European standards so they could afford to do it). Another reason why the Catholic bloc fared better is because the Vatican imposed a uniform liturgical language, thus literary lingua franca, across a vast area, whereas the Eastern/Oriental Orthodox intellectual scene was fragmented among Greek, Church Slavonic, Aramaic, Armenian, Coptic, and Ge'ez speakers. Especially before the invention of the printing press this made a huge difference in developmental outcomes.
To give another example about enforcing rules, polygamy was outlawed by Christianity from the start but it didn't die out in Christian Europe until about the High Middle Ages. Thus, it couldn't be taken for granted that the mere fact of a religion existing led to this kind of progress. It was a continuous battle by the "saints" against the "sinners". Sometimes the moral muscle would atrophy and things would slide backwards, such as in the Ottoman Empire, which became notorious for how common homosexuality and male pederasty was, and in Afghanistan and Pakistan to the point where they're still grappling with bacha bazi today.
Likewise, societies that were already religious could go even further and experience a religious revival. See Geneva under John Calvin's influence, or early modern England where every other crime was punishable by the death penalty. Protestantism led to more puritanical societies than their Catholic neighbors, though Catholicism itself enjoyed a lesser revival through the Counter-Reformation. And this itself was a continuation of growing interest in the religious life that began during the High Middle Ages, such as with the Devotio Moderna movement.
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@badger
That's funny because it definitely seems like a go-to for republicans that leftists are "exploiting" tragedies when shit like this happens.IWRA is just easily disgusted by what he considers immoral/inhumane. That's obvious to me at least who feels a lot of disgust watching you lot shittalk around these issues. Either way, makes a lot more sense than your motive for him.
More Americans die from fentanyl alone than from all gun deaths, including suicides or accidents, and from all (non-abortion) murders via any method, combined. But when Republicans talk about "shutting down the southern border" to deal with this crisis, as the vast majority of our fentanyl supply is imported from Latin America, you ascribe to them a cynical political motive. You assume that no Republican really does want to deal with the fentanyl crisis by shutting down the pathways through which its enters the US.
Things get politicized. That's just how it goes. It doesn't negate the sincere concerns held by millions of people underpinning said politics. Of course, IWRA is a notorious partisan circle-jerker so the odds that he actually cares about those dead kids is slim to none. Maybe you do.
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Putin, a contemporary Hitler-lite who launched a bloody unprovoked war of aggression in Ukraine, has been wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) since March of 2023. All member states to the Rome Statute are legally obliged to arrest Putin and extradite him to the Court should he ever step foot in their territory. It was this fear of arrest that caused Putin to skip attendance of the 2023 BRICS Summit in South Africa, since South Africa is a member state.
No more. Today Putin touched ground in Mongolia, which is also a member state. But unlike in South Africa in 2023 he does not fear arrest. He will be in the country with impunity, presumably meet with its President, and then go back to Russia a free man. Because Mongolia will not touch him. In so doing, Mongolia has become an accomplice to Russia's crimes in Ukraine.
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@badger
Ban a cesspit website where human decency and common sense are regularly subverted
Don't like Twitter? Think it's a cesspit? Then don't use it. There you go, problem solved. Just don't use it. Or better yet, use it and tweak your recommended content so that you're unlikely to get far-right tweets cluttering your feed.
But the thing is, you do not get to ban Twitter for 40 million people who do choose to use it, and whose lives are enriched by it in some form or another, because you're salty that a few people who you hate are also allowed to speak their minds on there.
and you're among the worst fascists alive in the world today
I'll admit that was somewhat hyperbolic (because I was posting while mad), but what's clear is that Brazil has taken a sharp authoritarian turn virtually overnight. You do not get to claim you're opposing fascism or protecting democracy and then turn around and do what fascists and other undemocratic regimes do, like using the state and its monopoly on violence to strip away free speech on the internet.
Meanwhile you're locking kids in cages
More of this Trump-era hysteria about kids in cages? We aren't past that?
Illegal immigrants trying to cross the border had to be intercepted and detained. That was the law of the land. Trump obeyed and enforced the law instead of breaking it like every recent President before him had, but Congress refused to authorize more funding for detention centers, so overcrowding was a problem for a while. During this time, children were separated from adults for obvious safety reasons, since the alternative was keeping them in close quarters with potential murderers and rapists, and because the "parents" they accompanied were often smugglers or even human traffickers.
and carrying out an endless tirade against a group of people who dare to express themselves harmlessly in some way you deem unfit
Compared to the culture warriors of 20-30 years ago, our aims are incredibly modest.
We want kids to wait until they're 18 before permanently sterilizing themselves and joining a fringe subculture with a sky-high suicide rate. We want the government and the oligarchic media to treat the subject neutrally instead of broadcasting psy-op propaganda to minors and easily influenced adults, without infringing on individual freedom of speech. Since bathroom stalls in America aren't very private, we don't want to create a situation where sexually predatory men would game a "transgender loophole" to gain access to female victims. On my part I support transmedicalism, in which men who are on hormones and have underwent surgery are eligible to change their legal sex and use women's bathrooms, and I think that moderates on both sides would find this a sensible compromise.
But supposing for the sake of argument that I'm wrong and all of the above is bad, it still doesn't rise to the level of killing free speech on the internet.
looking real ready to roll out the concentration camps again when the next Hitler comes along
I won't dignify this with a response.
Ya know, this is what comes of letting the truly sexually aberrant into politics. And by that I mean the sexless and the repressed.
If you mean conservatives in general, you're talking the demographic of married men with children who have plenty of regular non-deviant sex with their wives. If you mean DARTers left and right, then maybe you have a point.
The rest of us are just out here living our lives man.
Given that you support what Brazil's doing, this is patently false.
Do you really think you've got any place telling us how when you're so clearly abnormal?
You're clearly out of your mind at this point and raving complete nonsense.
Hating the thought of another coloured person entering the country.
We are the party of legal immigration. Doesn't matter their skin color so long as they respect the law and would contribute positively to America instead of going straight onto the dole, committing crimes, or siding with a revisionist ideology that would tear down the founding ideas of our country.
You've always been such a bunch of socially inept fuckfaces.
It's clear you are full of hate and prejudice, and you have zero business accusing us of bearing this attribute.
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Ah yes. This wouldn't truly be a DART thread without ebuc and one of his Time Cube posts. Keep deboonking those Evangelical nutters, man.
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To be clear, this will adversely impact 40 million Brazilian Twitter users, who have a right to freely access information online. Twitter is a huge and globally well-known platform. Without Twitter, most people will congregate to the lowest hanging fruit, such as Brazilian platforms under the government's oppressive thumb or other foreign platforms which are more than happy to collaborate with the Lula da Silva regime.
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After its 2022 presidential elections, in which Bolsonaro lost, Brazil had its own capitol storming. I don't condone this attack, in the same way that I don't condone what happened in the US on January 6, 2021. Unfortunately, the country's new President, Lula da Silva, used this as an excuse to go full-blown authoritarian. Using a high-ranking judge named Alexandre de Moraes (hereafter "Judge Moraes"), he started cracking down on right-wing speech online.
This started when the new regime ordered the suspension of several Brazilian right-wing accounts on Twitter, not for an actual crime but for "misinformation". This was done, presumably through Twitter's offices in Brazil. In April of this year those accounts were reinstated. Judge Moraes was incensed and ordered Twitter to reverse this course of action. Twitter's legal representative in the country was threatened with arrest if she didn't follow through, so she resigned, and even after her resignation Judge Moraes froze her bank accounts. After this, Judge Moraes demanded that Twitter appoint a new legal representative, and then imposed a deadline after which Twitter would be blocked in the country if the company refused.
That deadline has expired, and Judge Moraes has ordered internet service providers to block access to Twitter for Brazilian internet users. He also imposed an almost $9,000 fine (in Brazilian money) per day for instance of continuing to use Twitter via VPN. Reports suggest Brazil has also tried to curtail access to VPNs altogether.
What delicious irony. The mask has come off, and the self-described opponents of fascism have proven themselves to be among the worst fascists alive in the world today.
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@IwantRooseveltagain
What are you basing that on? And What was the average life expectancy of a slave?
A few decades at least. Compared to less than 9 months for an aborted fetus.
To call termination of a pregnancy a crime is a lie.
It is a crime in the moral sense, in the same way that the killings at Dachau or Auschwitz were crimes despite the Nazi "legal code" (if it could be said to have one) deeming them legal. A fundamental principle of human law is that it's merely the codification of a higher law, be its source God or abstract morality. If you do not believe this to be true, then it follows that you would idly sit by and support any genocidal action by the US government so long as it were made legal first. If this is the case, then I feel sorry for you.
If you don’t want to own a slave, don’t buy one. But MIND YOURE OWN DAMN BUSINESS!
Fixed.
I’ll remind you that a senior Trump aid, Jason Miller, knocked up his mistress and he and Trump tried to get her to have an abortion. When she wouldn’t do it they fired her. Nice hypocrisy
Non sequitur. Every movement has a few hypocritical individuals, including the progressive causes you believe in. And it has a non-hypocritical majority. Save I guess for climate change, since 100% of climate activists are polluters.
At the end of the 8th week after fertilization (10 weeks of pregnancy), the embryo is considered a fetus.
Okay, so pregnancy has stages of development. I and every other American adult knew this already, and it doesn't change anything I've said, because fetal right to life isn't contingent on stage of development. You yourself are unconscious every time you fall asleep, much like a fetus, but that doesn't justify someone breaking into your house and blowing your brains out so long as they succeed in doing it without waking you up first.
Abortions after 22 weeks are extremely rare and involve the life and health of the mother.
So a woman at week 21 might have second thoughts about becoming a mother, but it never happens after week 22? Yeah no, that's a load of crock and you know it. If abortions after week 22 are "extremely rare", then it's only because of laws restricting it.
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